Sunday, June 14, 2015

What image comes into your mind when you hear the phrase “white
supremacy”? If you are a modern American, well-socialized into the
current reigning ideology, the image is probably an old monochrome news
picture from the Civil Rights era featuring leering white cops
assaulting helpless blacks with billy clubs, attack dogs, or fire hoses.

In his 1944 book, Bombing Vindicated, former Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry J.M. Spaight, revealed that on May 11, 1940 the British government had commenced unrestricted bombing of German cities, known as “The Splendid Decision,” to which the Germans responded in kind. Spaight traces this decision to 1936 when Bomber Command was organized, with “the whole raison d’ etre of Bomber Command was to bomb Germany should she be our enemy.” Visiting Germany as a military observer during the Franco-Prussian War, General Philip Sheridan, known for his brutal devastation of Americans in the Shenandoah Valley, was surprised that the Germans did not starve and torch their French enemies. By 1940, they had learned Sheridan’s lesson.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Principles of International Justice Left in Ruins

“Nothing better illustrates how hell may be paved by good intentions which crumble than the war-crimes trials themselves. No doubt many who supported them were motivated by primitive Mongol demands for the massacre of defeated enemies, by “scientific” Marxian precepts which called for the liquidation of elements that could not be assimilated into a proletarian and totalitarian society, and by a purely vindictive desire for revenge.

On the other hand, many sincerely believed that the trial and punishment of men, many of whom had certainly been guilty of ordering or permitting unspeakable and boundless cruelties, would both reduce the prospect of future wars and make any that did take place more humane and restrained. During the Second World war, even Germany and Russia, despite their mass butcheries in the war in the East, refrained from using such lethal weapons, already in plentiful reserve, as poison gas and disease germs, for fear of possible retaliation.

The war-trials, by making it crystal clear that the losers will, henceforth, be subjected to such trials, regarded as aggressors whether they were or not (it was not emphasized at Nurnberg that England and France declared war on Germany), and be hanged or subjected to long prison terms, whether guilty as charged or not, made it inevitable that all the restraints that survived the Second world war would be thrown to the winds in the third – as even the limited war in Korea has demonstrated.

Since nothing worse can happen to a national war leader than to be disgraced, tortured and hanged, if defeated, there is no logical psychological reason for failing to throw in everything which may promise victory, however lethal and barbarous.

By 1952, the only belief of the early post-war years which still survived more or less unshaken was the belief that the Second World War had at least resulted in the establishment of new international standards of justice. As we have seen, as late as March 1951, the then British attorney-general, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was able, without making himself ridiculous, to put forward a moving appeal that what he called the principles of international justice established at Nurnberg should not be undermined for purposes of political expediency.

This comforting belief remained unshaken until it was reported in July 1952, that the Chinese Communists had indicated an intention to subject in due course certain of their prisoners of war captured in the Korean campaign to war-trials carried out “in accordance with the principles established by the international military tribunals of Nurnberg and Tokyo.”

In thousands of homes on both sides of the Atlantic the matter ceased to be an academic problem whether certain more or less worthy or unworthy foreigners had been unjustly condemned a few years before.

The anxious relatives of the British and American soldiers, sailors and airmen serving in Korea – and of those in the armed forces who might later be called upon to serve in Korea – had no difficulty in foreseeing what would be the result of war-trials carried out “in accordance with the Nurnberg principles.” All the illusions on this subject instantly vanished.

What may be regarded as the obituary notice of the Nurnberg war-trials was pronounced by Ex-Lord Chancellor Maugham in a letter to the London Times of July 25, 1952. “The Nurnberg Tribunal,” declared Lord Maugham, “never purported to lay down “principles” for all mankind.”

Perhaps it was always an unreasonable hope that the British Air Ministry’s “Splendid Decision” of May 11, 1940, would result in the establishment of any principles. The eighteen Whitley bombers which left England on that memorable spring night, in what now seems the remote past, did not set forth to establish principles.

The bombs which they dropped in the darkness on the countryside of Westphalia may, indeed, by chance have hit railway installations. Perhaps it is best to regard this historic air raid as a symbolic act, unconnected with corpses or debris, which left behind it in ruins nothing more substantial than the principles of civilized warfare that had been established in Europe for over two hundred years.

Similarly, the war-trials which were the outcome of that perhaps equally splendid decision taken at the Tehran Conference in 1943, did not, as we are now informed, lead to the establishment of any new principles of justice. Perhaps some day it may become generally agreed that, without establishing any new principles of justice, the war-trials actually left in ruins the principles of justice which had been accepted without question by all civilized peoples for many centuries.

Indiscriminate bombing invincibly linked warfare with barbaric military practices and ghastly mortality. All this would be intensified by the extensive use of guided missiles in later wars. The war-crimes trials at Nurnberg, Tokyo and elsewhere linked postwar procedures with juristic barbarism and made mandatory the utilization of the most savage methods of warfare in order to avert defeat and judicial lynching.”

Fortunately, this time there was CCTV video. Louisville is one of the PC zones where
Black Grievance propaganda thrives. In 2014 the Louisville community
was held hostage by mobs of “black teens”. The political correctness was so extreme the FBI was dispatched to aid the city because the local authority, Mayor and Police Chief, claimed they could do nothing to protect the public from the mobs.

LOUISVILLE (WHAS11)
— One man is dead and a Metro Police officer is on administrative leave
following a shooting Saturday afternoon. LMPD Chief Steve Conrad said
the officer, who he did not identify, was responding to a report of a
woman assaulted in the 300 block of West Oak St. The officer saw a man
matching the suspect description and approached him, said Conrad.

Moments later the officer fired two shots at the man. He was taken to
University Hospital where he died from his injuries. Conrad said the
officer shot the man twice in self-defense because he tried to attack
the officer with a flag pole.

Two teenagers were mauled in separate shark attacks on the same stretch of North Carolina beach today, local officials said.

A teenage girl lost a part of her arm when she was bitten by a shark in
an attack that occurred around 4 p.m. in Oak Island, a beach about 30
miles south of Wilmington, according to Brunswick County officials.

The girl lost part of her left arm and may lose her left leg, Oak Island
Mayor Betty Wallace said in a Facebook post. She been airlifted to New
Hanover Hospital in Wilmington, Wallace said.

Less than two hours later a 16-year-old boy was attacked in the same area, and Wallace said he may have lost his arm.

It's a busy world beyond the borders of Alabama so, each Sunday,
we'll bring you some of the most interesting stories being discussed in
national opinion pages. What did you read today that sparked your
interest? Let us know in the comments.

104 years ago a state adopted a flag that represented the legacy of
generations of slave owners, murderers, thieves, drunks and squatters.
The flag, though often controversial, has become a beloved symbol of
regional pride and, now, has come under fire by the media.

Some commentators disputed the decision to name the ship after Giffords, with two retired U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps officers criticizing the trend of naming ships for political reasons[8] while military blogger Spencer Ackerman called it "The USS Shameless Cynicism."[9] In response, some commentators have noted that several ships in the US Navy, including Henry M. Jackson, Carl Vinson, John C. Stennis, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush were named for prominent politicians who were still alive at the time of the naming, and that the still-active Carl Vinson was named for a congressman responsible for barring women from combat roles in the Navy for nearly 50 years, although unlike those other politicians, Giffords had not played a long and prominent role in the area of national defense.[10][11]

The years after 1865 saw the family as the core of Southern society and “within its bounds everything worthwhile took place.” Even in the early twentieth century Southerners working in exile up North imported corn meal and cured hams, and missed the North Carolina home where “Aunt Nancy still measures by hand and taste,” and where “the art of cooking famous old dishes lives on.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Endlessly Contemplating the Past on the Front Porch

“The governing families [of the South] . . . possessed modesty and good breeding in ample measure; much informal geniality without familiarity; a marked social distinction that was neither deliberate nor self-conscious. Indeed, the best families in the South were the most delightful segment of the American elite.

Southern charm reached its culmination in the Southern lady, a creature who, like her plantation grandmother, could be feminine and decorative without sacrificing any privileges except the masculine prerogative to hold public office. Count Hermann Keyserling in 1929 was impressed by “that lovely type of woman called “The Southern Girl,” who, in his opinion, possessed the subtle virtues of the French lady.

What at times appeared to be ignorance, vanity or hypocrisy, frequently turned out to be the innate politeness of the Southerner who sought to put others at ease.

To a greater degree than other Americans, Southerners practiced what may be regarded as the essence of good manners: the idea that the outward form of inherited or imposed ideals should be maintained regardless of what went on behind the scenes. Southern ideals were more extensive and inflexible than those prevailing elsewhere in America. To the rigid code of plantation days was added, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the repressions of puritanism imposed by the Protestant clergy, who demanded that the fiddle be silenced and strong drink eschewed “on pain of ruin in this world and damnation in the next.”

Although Southerners were among the hardest drinkers in America, one reason they voted for Al Smith in 1928 was because he openly defended drinking. Many critics called this attitude hypocrisy, even deceit; the Southerners, however, insisted upon making the distinction between hedonistic tendencies and long-established ideals. If such evasiveness did not create a perfect code of morals, at least it helped to repress the indecent.

The home in the twentieth century remained the core of a social conservatism fundamentally Southern, still harboring “the tenacious clan loyalty that was so mighty a cohesive force in colonial society.” A living symbol of the prevailing domestic stability was the front porch where, in the leisure of the rocking chair, the Southerner endlessly contemplated the past. Here nothing important had happened since the Civil War, except that the screen of trees and banisters had grown more protective.

The most obvious indication of the tenacity of home life was the survival of the Southern style of cooking. Assaults upon it came from the outside, with scientists claiming that monotony and lack of balance in the eating habits of millions resulted in such diseases as pellagra.

National advertising imposed Northern food products upon those Southerners who would heed. Federal subsidies after 1914 enabled home economics to carry the new science of nutrition into Southern communities and schools. Yet no revolution in diet took place. Possibly, the . . . teachers overstepped . . . when they sought to introduce the culinary customs of Battle Creek and Boston. Their attempted revolution failed for the same reason as that of the Yankee schoolma’ams during Reconstruction.”

(The South Old and New, A History 1820-1947, Francis Butler Simkins, Alfred A. Knopf, excerpts pp. 292-295)

Lincoln was not the first to invoke an emancipation of slaves in the South for the purpose of carrying off his enemy’s agricultural labor and inciting a bloody race war – Virginia’s Royal Governor Lord Dunmore did this in 1775 and Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane the same in 1814. As enlistments for his war machine had virtually ceased after the carnage of 1862, Lincoln saw more blue-clad troops in slaves carried off from their Southern plantation homes.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Lincoln’s Instrument of Subjugation

“Lincoln had laid aside his [emancipation] proclamation waiting for a victory. He waited two months, meanwhile giving out public statements based on his previous noncommittal attitude [regarding African slavery]; then on September 22, after Lee’s invasion had been foiled at [Sharpsburg], he issued the preliminary proclamation.

That this proclamation was far from an abolition document is shown by a careful reading of its provisions. The President began by reiterating that the purpose of the war was the restoration of the Union and reaffirming his intention still to labor for compensated emancipation. He then declared that on January 1, 1863, slaves in rebellious States should be “then, thenceforward, and forever free” . . .

The proclamation was not expressive of any general antislavery policy. On January 1, 1863, the definitive proclamation was issued, its chief provision being that in regions then designated as “in rebellion,” (with certain notable exceptions) all slaves were declared free. [But] the stereotyped picture of the emancipator suddenly striking the shackles from millions of slaves by a stroke of the presidential pen is altogether inaccurate.

The whole State of Tennessee was omitted [from the proclamation]; none of the Union slave States was included; and there were important exceptions as to portions of Virginia and Louisiana, those being portions within Union military lines. In fact freedom was decreed only in regions then under Confederate control.

“The President has purposely made the proclamation inoperative [declared the New York World] in all places where we have gained a military footing which makes the slaves accessible. He has proclaimed emancipation only where he has notoriously no power to execute it. The exemption of the accessible parts of Louisiana, Tennessee and Virginia renders the proclamation not merely futile, but ridiculous.

The proclamation is issued as a war measure, as an instrument for the subjugation of the rebels. But that cannot be a means of military success which presupposes this same . . . success as the condition of its own existence . . . A war measure it clearly is not, inasmuch as the previous success of the war is the thing that can give it validity.”

“We show our sympathy with slavery, [Secretary of State William] Seward is reported to have said, “by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

The London Spectator declared (October 11, 1862): “The government liberates the enemy’s slaves as it would the enemy’s cattle, simply to weaken them in the . . . conflict . . . The principle is not that a human being cannot justify owning another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”

Earl Russell in England declared: “The Proclamation . . . appears to be of a very strange nature. It professes to emancipate all slaves in places where the United States authorities cannot exercise any jurisdiction . . . but it does not decree emancipation . . . in any States, or parts of States, occupied by federal troops . . . and where, therefore, emancipation . . . might have been carried into effect . . . There seems to be no declaration of a principle adverse to slavery in this proclamation.”

It will be noted that Lincoln justified his act as a measure of war. To uphold his view would be to maintain that the freeing of enemy slaves was a legitimate weapon of war to be wielded by the President . . . [and] in the new attitude toward slavery which the war produced [in the North] it was natural to find considerable support for the view that slavery was a legitimate target o the war power [of the President]; but it is a matter of plain history that prior to the Civil War the United States had emphatically denied the “belligerent right” of emancipation.

Indeed, John Quincy Adams, who has been credited by his grandson [Charles Francis Adams] with having originated the idea of the emancipation proclamation, declared officially while secretary of state in 1820 that “No such right [emancipation of slaves] is acknowledged as a Law of War by writers who admit any limitation.”

To Lincoln’s mind the war emergency justified things normally unconstitutional. “I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional,” he said, “might become lawful by becoming indispensible to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation.”

In a video interview, following the chaos of the Craig Ranch pool party, Mr. Marvin Bakari and his 13-year-old daughter Jahda Bakari took to the airwaves to make a very specific series of claims.

If you were to follow the construct of the racial narrative espoused
by the activists around the Craig Ranch incident, you will find the
media delivered “RACISM” story originates specifically from Marvin
Bakari and his daughter Jahda. No-one claimed any racial tones to the
events until Marvin Bakari stepped forward claiming racism.

This is important because the Black Lives Matter national activists flocked to the neighborhood based in large measure on the claims of the Bakari’s.

Initially it seemed curious to see a fundraiser being
broadcast by the professional Black Grievance Industry (BGI) within 36
hours of a controversial story; before the actual facts behind the
events even surfaced.

There is an old saying in the South, that a provoked Southerner will
be polite right up to the moment they kill you. I must confess that it
took all within me to address you by your name rather than some term
that would reflect the opprobrium you so richly deserve. I shall also
suppress the rage that would result in any harm to you because then I
would be behaving like a Marxist and lowering myself to the position of
baseness you occupy.

Years ago I would have simply shaken my head at the kind of comments
you make in your coverage of the Yates family’s loss, choosing to
ascribe such nonsense to simple ignorance. An example right out of the
gate regarding ignorance in your commentary is that you refer to the
flag you find so offensive as the Bars and Stars. The term of course is
Stars and Bars. Moreover the flag flying in the coverage you mention
is neither the Bars and Stars nor Stars and Bars (which was the
Confederacy’s first official national flag)- it is the Confederate
Battleflag, naval jack version – and judging by its condition, I’d say
it’s been flying on that pole for a very long time.

You raise the question “What was their son fighting and for who?”
You repeat it, both its bad form and grammar twice and connect the query
in the most tortured way to both old and new, but false judgments about
the Confederate flag that are simple repetitions of a combination of
northern propaganda and today’s Cultural Marxist interpretation of the
country’s history. I suppose one can’t be surprised at that given
you’re from New Jersey, educated in New York and a Jacobin. (I have
visited your website – the editorial policy section says “coming soon”).
Let me aid you a bit by answering your twice repeated question and
explain to you how your editorial policy (judging by your commentary
about the Yates family) should be described.

Before I do so, let me comment that it is highly appropriate to be
responding to you this Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day) that has
origins in the decorating of Confederate soldiers graves after the War
of Northern Aggression. It is also appropriate because I’m more than
likely kin to the Yates on my father’s mother’s side. Remarking on that
kinship will help give more context as I continue. Our part of the
Yates clan wound up in the mountains of Virginia, an area where, were
you to visit you’d have an opportunity to be offended by Confederate
flags frequently.

Just across the Virginia/Kentucky border is Pike County Kentucky
(the County named after a Confederate Gen’l) where if you were to visit
the courthouse you would find the name of one of my Revolutionary War
ancestors on a plague there as one of 12 such veterans buried in the
County. That grandfather’s grandson George Washington Childress, along
with many of his brothers, first cousins, Yates, Gibson, Shortridge boys
(the Shortridges being my great great grandmother’s family etc) – all
my kin – served in the 10th Kentucky Cavalry Confederate States Army.
100 years later George Washington Childress’ great grandson, Martin Dean
Childress was killed in Vietnam while serving in the 1st Cavalry
Division.

When you remark that your empathy for the Yates turned to scorn upon
seeing the Confederate flag, given the brief history I’ve cited above,
my reaction to you cannot be covered by the word scorn. Absolute
contempt for you is what you provoke. Let’s review the particulars
before I attempt to answer your question – my comments in brackets. You
write:

“It sounds like a harsh question for a family in grief but one that
needs to be raised considering their use of such a racially offensive
symbol….. [yes indeed a harsh and silly question – but only a ideologue
would place politics over civility]…..

Could you have imagined the outrage if a Nazi swastika had been
displayed? Sure you can. [I don’t have to imagine the outrage that your
gratuitous raising of that issue provokes – that you would do so shows
either your total ignorance of these matters, or your dishonesty growing
from that ideological rather than historical stance – more on that in a
bit]

Yet, no reporter at this press conference raised the question ..[it
is not shocking that even reporters would have more common sense than
you do, given what you’ve written so far]..over the use of a treasonous
symbol that is a blatant insult to our national heritage….[I have
included in a PS some of the US laws concerning treatment of Confederate
Veterans – there seems to be a disconnect here between you and your
government]

Of course, there are those who will say it would have been in bad
taste for the family to be hit with such a question. I could not
disagree more….[There are those! Astounding – I’d say those as you call
them are legion -- Again, only an ideologue would pursue bad taste in
order to propagate his political agenda in such an entirely
inappropriate moment]

This young man was a soldier in the United States military and sworn
to protect the ideals the American flag represents. The other flag is
in direct contradiction to those ideals and an insult to every man and
woman in uniform.” [Technically he was sworn to defend the US
Constitution and the country from its enemies, foreign and domestic –
the ideal of the US Constitution of course – what such is - is the crux
of the matter – and given the actual historical record whether the US
flag or the Confederate flag represents that ideal the best. You
Cultural Marxists are simply trying to redefine what those ideals were
and silence any and all who disagree. Redefining the symbolic meaning
of Confederate flags is exactly the kind dialectical mental gymnastics
for which the Jacobin project is renowned].

Now, to answer your question --- let me connect the dots for you.
(And mind you, I have no illusion that you’re educable – ideologues are
not educable after all, but this communication will eventually be read
by a few thousand people and from that number some more will be provoked
to action against you modern Jacobins – for that I thank you).

A few years ago I made these comments to a communist email correspondent concerning these matters.

“….You seem to be accepting what passes for analysis today, without
being able to see the internal inconsistencies of some of your
assertions… . It has been my experience that the majority of folks who
expound as you have, really do understand, but make the deliberate
choice to obfuscate. There are others, such as the Yankee historian
James McPherson, who admit that Southerners of the 1860s believed they
were fighting for liberty just as their ancestors had against England,
but despite that, assert and thereby admit it is good that the original
republic was overthrown by Lincoln in order to effect the establishment
of the egalitarian world now almost fully in place. That egalitarian
world order (The Agenda) springs from the philosophy of one Jean Jacque
Rousseau whose [expounding on same] helped inspire something now known
as Jacobinism, the idea that the Old Order had to be violently
overthrown to obtain liberty for humankind. … My email ask[ed]…
questions …that indeed intimated my opposition to Jacobin thinking,
[but],… By your logic, …[the elucidation of that opposition] is
responsible for the [existence of “racist thinking”]. That is nonsense.
Criticizing Rousseau and the pernicious affects of his thinking, of
which socialism, communism and fascism are the modern “scientific”
results, mixed with other influences, (the northern victory in the War
of Northern Aggression being one of the most important), does not make
one a racist or one unmindful of how badly we humans can and have
treated one another. To assert so is either intellectual dishonesty,
evidence of muddy thinking, or of that deliberate obfuscation to which I
referred above.

Moreover, the rise of totalitarian states, the existence of which are
necessitated by The Agenda Rousseau helped shape, is a direct
consequence of that Agenda gaining ascendancy. The South’s political
philosophy was the mortal enemy of that Agenda, so as one who believes
the South was correct in its opposition to it, I have nothing good at
all to say about Hitler’s brownshirts. To the contrary, the South
fought with every fiber of its being against the ideas that eventually
became, through a complex and inadequately understood set of
inter-relationships between opposing camps of Enlightenment philosophy,
played out over a few hundred years of history, the breeding ground for
the Hitlers and Stalins of the world. (Don’t forget, Hitler was a
National Socialist. To explain how he is viewed as being of the Right
would require a longer story than possible in this email to you,
detailing that complex interrelationship and indeed the failure to
understand that story yields the current confusion of which so many,
including you,..[are deluded].

The racial supremacy stuff is also part of that overall confusion, but
as a hint for now - the modern emphasis on and political use of race is
also a direct outgrowth of Rousseau. There is only one human race, but
there are many human cultures. To confuse the two, yields fertile
ground for the kind of race based demagoguery to which your argument
falls victim and precludes dealing with very difficult issues by mixing
them all up into what has become a stinking stew, all for the
maintenance of the political utility that mixing has for the purpose of
maintaining certain folks and their world view in power. Your pounding
on slavery and race is the perfect example. ........”

And you Mister Fields are simply one more of such examples. More dots (from another correspondence from a few years ago):

The problem of course, is that we Southerners did what our leaders
told us. We laid down our arms and tried to become good (albeit
re-defined) Americans. Indeed, Richard Weaver in is Southern Essays,
complained that we did that all too well. He remarked,

“Of all the lingering evils the South suffered as a result of
military defeat, none was graver that the almost total extinction of
initiative. Those who marvel that the section has lived so much in
memory, ….should recall that for a long period it was denied the right
of exercising leadership…… We have therefore, been largely powerless to
prevent these lies from gaining credence”

But today maintaining those lies is not all that is demanded.
Today, the demand is to entirely expunge from memory the truth (by
disallowing flag displays, tearing down monuments, etc etc) of that
cause for which our ancestors fought. It might be helpful to hear an
excerpt from scholar Eugene D. Genovese (a lifelong communist) who
remarked in his book, The Southern Tradition-The Achievement and
Limitations of an American Conservatism.

“…[Today] We are witnessing a cultural and political
atrocity.....Southerners are being taught to forget their forbears or to
remember them with shame …. The northern victory in 1865 silenced a
discretely southern [viewpoint]....[and] sanctified northern
institutions and intentions......in consequence, from that day to this,
the southern-conservative critique of modern gnosticism has been wrongly
equated with racism and white Supremacy.........To speak positively
about any part of this southern tradition is to invite charges of being a
racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. ….. From the
beginning of my academic career in the 1950s, I have argued that the
Left would have to learn some hard lessons from southern conservatives
if it were ever to rescue itself from the overt totalitarianism of
Stalinism and the disquised totalitarian tendencies that infect
left-liberalism and social democracy. The hard lessons I have had in
mind, which especially concern the Left's rosy view of human nature and
the irrationalities of its radical egalitarianism [which is the
philosophy that won in the American Civil War], …… For "a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind" requires that those of us who spent
our lives in a political movement that piled up tens of millions of
corpses to sustain a futile cause and hideous political regimes have a
few questions to answer….[The "modernization" of the South] has a price
that northerners, southerners and blacks will rue having to pay. That
price includes a neglect of, or contempt for, the history of southern
whites, without which some of the more distinct and noble features of
American national life must remain incomprehensible…….”

I grew up Mr. Fields in Cleveland, Ohio in northern schools…. As I
read more and more during my childhood, it became clear to me at a young
age that the north’s victory in the war had reversed what had been won
in the war to secede from the British Empire (The Revolutionary War).
It is impossible to put the South’s struggle for independence some 80
plus years later in context without understanding the issues of the war
against England for our original independence and that other revolution
(the French). …one must remember that the Confederacy’s leaders were
standing in the traditions of their fathers – for the principles of
English Common Law that themselves owed to many centuries of development
in what is now called The Western Tradition, constraining the arbitrary
power of kings and concentrations of power (Scotland’s resistance to
the English crown [think Braveheart] being very much a part of that
constraining).

The French Revolution had as its conceptual base the philosophy of
Jean Jacque Rousseau – which in its political manifestation came to be
called Jacobinism. (Indeed, all the “isms” of modernity are either its
direct offspring or reactions to it). It’s tenets were that human
societies up to that point had caged humanity through the cooperation of
kings and priests and had to be overthrown- in other words the Western
Tradition and any other religiously founded ones had to go. In their
place a new type of society was to be created, at the point of the sword
as necessary. To state it differently- Rousseau believed humans could
be perfected through proper political arrangements not founded on
religious superstitions but on what humans thought best for themselves.
Any who oppose such are the enemies of human progress and must be
eliminated. As such it was the enemy of religious traditions and all
then existing traditional governments. Lincoln ignorantly brought the
ideals of the French Revolution (read the Gettysburg Address which
turned the American founding upside down) into the driver’s seat- Europe
would finally wholly follow after WWI.

That transition was aided when Karl Marx put a pseudo scientific
veneer over Rousseau and when the peasants overthrew the Russian
monarchy one of the more extreme versions resulted. New England’s own
religious brand of this kind of spirit morphed into the Jacobin secular
version (called American Progressivism.. what Kentuckian Robert Penn
Warren called ‘the treasury of virtue’ stored up by fighting one of
those traditional governments, The Southern Confederacy)- Indeed, I
would argue that the South’s defeat, opened the door to the entire
world’s adopting or being forced to react to some version of a Jacobin
inspired ism. After the northern victory in 1865 and the century
between then and 1965, the world experienced the bloodiest 100 years
known in all human history as all those isms began to fight one another.
The world was fractured asunder between 1776 and 1918. Where we end
up living among the fragments is still in process.

Because modern political entities are founded on a revolutionary
ethic-they themselves are subject to revolutionary re-arrangement. Many
are familiar with Lord Acton’s quote, “Power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely”. [By the way, the preceding is the end of
the quote – it begins with “When power is allowed to concentrate into
one or a few hands, you will be ruled by gangsters”] Acton was Sir John
Dahlberg, one of the nineteenth century’s pre-eminent political
philosophers. What is almost wholly unknown about Acton is that he
exchanged letters with Robert E. Lee after the northern victory.

Excerpting:

Robert E. Lee , "All that the South has ever desired was the Union
as established by our forefathers should be preserved and that the
government as originally organized should be administered in purity and
truth."

Acton,".....The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on
the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have
belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle
which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated
to remedy. …Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our
liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake
which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which
was saved at Waterloo."

Lee replied:"…. I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights
and authority reserved to the states and to the people, … essential to
…. safeguard ..the continuance of a free government…. whereas the
consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be
aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of
that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded
it.......The South has contended only for the supremacy of the
Constitution, and the just administration of the laws made in pursuance
to it."

Later Dahlberg wrote an analysis of the war in which he said: "The
North has used the doctrines of Democracy to destroy self-government.
The South applied the principle of conditional federation to cure the
evils and to correct the errors of a false interpretation of
Democracy................[and the inevitable result of an unfettered
federal government will be] the initiative in administration; the
function of universal guardian and paymaster; the resources of coercion,
intimidation, and corruption; the habit of preferring the public
interest of the moment to the established law; .............. a public
creditor; a prodigious budget – these things will remain to the future
government of the Federal Union, and will make it approximate more
closely to the imperial than to the republican type of democracy…..By
exhibiting the spectacle of a people claiming to be free, but whose love
of freedom means hatreds of inequality, jealousy of limitations to
power, and reliance on the States as an instrument to mould as well as
to control society, it calls on its admirers to hate aristocracy and
teaches its adversaries to fear the people."

And just how many Peoples Republics of this and that exist today?
And in the name of a given political entity’s power, consolidated in the
claim to act in its peoples will and for their benefit, just how many
slaughters have occurred? The US piece of this equation is daunting to
see, because we’re blinded by New England’s explanation of the country’s
founding and purpose in the world. We do not understand that our first
experience with terrorism inspired by revolutionary fervor was John
Brown’s raid into Virginia to effect the violent overthrow of Southern
governments- funded and inspired by that cooperation between New
England’s Puritans and Jacobins. It is significant that after many
years of talking about separation, the South did so only after John
Brown’s raid revealed the true nature of where matters were headed.

Rather than Lincoln’s vision of national power consolidated to
reflect the iron will of the northern majority, the South believed the
only way to prevent the evils attended thereto was to maintain as a
counter balance, state power. As the Virginian Robert L Dabney wrote,
“The people of the South went to war, because they sincerely believed
what their political fathers had taught them, with one voice, for two
generations that the doctrine of State-sovereignty for which they
fought, was absolutely essential as the bulwark of the liberties of the
people."

We know the end of that story- we’re living in it. And where have
matters been brought? We have witnessed all over the globe as Lee put
it governments “sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home” who
claim to act in the name of their people to accomplish its particular
vision of political perfection- the mantra goes something like 1) We
(your moral and intellectual superiors) know how people should live 2)
Your group is not living by that vision 3) It is imperative, for the
sake of, peace, human rights and progress that humankind should be made
to conform with that vision 3) Given that imperative, we have the
right to force that result 4) Even if it means destroying the
opponents of that vision.

What does mean regarding service in Iraq? It reflects the fact the
current version of the United States is schizophrenic in these matters
and it is so precisely because it houses within its governmental
structure as a Canadian writer recently wrote that there are really two
countries within its confines: One conservative and one revolutionary.
No where is that fact better demonstrated than in our current troubles
in Iraq. Please allow me to get you to consider some observations.

I ask you to recall what President Bush said in his 2nd Inaugural speech rendered in January 2005

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the
success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world
is the expansion of freedom in all the world,…. It is the policy of the
United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and
institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of
ending tyranny in the world."

On other occasions, our purpose has been described as ‘ending evil
in the world’ and our object to create in the Middle East a democratic
society rather than the sorts that have grown out of the mixture of
Islamic and socialist Gnosticisms. Indeed, the famous speechwriter for
Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan, in her criticism of that speech and policy
described it as too Jacobin for her and that,

“….To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division [which
has been] defined as a division between moralists (modern Jacobin
romantics if you will) and realists (small c conservatives, if you’ll
allow)--the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy
and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be
called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental
power--President Bush sided strongly with the moralists….”

New York native Noonan ends her criticism with the statement that,
“[One wishes for] a sense that there are [a] few legitimate boundaries
to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts. One wonders
if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely
grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is
actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.”

Do we have a severe challenge facing us from a religious
totalitarian view that has come to be called radical Islam (they being
Islam’s own ‘Puritan Element)? – yes, we do. Is the solution what has
been chosen; a United States that has not yet lost its own puritanical,
revolutionary fervor - it freed the slaves, fights racism, sexism,
homophobism, etc etc. and now radical Islam through its export of
democracy? We shall see. But indeed, I ask you to consider that
…..today those who have taken Lincoln global by unleashing a war against
Iraq (and all the rest to follow) which will be unending and deadly
because it seeks unobtainable goals against an enemy that will not do as
the Christian Robert E. Lee did in 1865 isn’t the wrong path?

We’ve actually seen this all before – in the years prior to 1860,
this country was told that the survival of the United States and the
continuance of free government depended on the crushing of the South.
Today we’re told such depends on crushing certain Middle Eastern
governments. A Southern soldier, when asked why he was fighting in the
1860s said, “because you’re here”. Pat Buchanan has likewise said that
Islam is an increased threat here, because we’re ‘over there’ in Iraq.

I would caution that Islam has the same (religious not secular)
thing to say in return to this Jacobin assault- the world should be
Muslim and we have the right to slaughter to accomplish that vision –
that clash is about to bring the world to its next round of catastrophe.
We’re either going to get these matters straight in our minds – and
get the sand out of our eyes of which Genovese spoke, thrown in them
now for over a century, or we’re going to face an apocalypse that will
make WWII seem small in comparison.

The soldiers of the Confederacy fought with every ounce of their
being to prevent converting our founding from one where people worked
out their future cooperatively and not at the barrel of a gun for the
purpose of overthrowing all that had come before, at the hands of
governments given radical power to effect that overthrowing. They owed
it to their family (especially those long dead) to fight such a
revolutionary and dangerous development.

But it should be no surprise that the Republican Party would embroil
us in such a predicament, now that it has been returned to its
northeastern roots. Just as that party cloaked its naked move to squash
the opponent of its profit seeking in the 1860s shielded by
anti-slavery posturing, today that party is intent upon protecting its
profits by securing the oil supplies of the Middle East behind the
rhetoric of “fighting that war on terror against the barbarians”. One
should never get between a Yankee and his money :

For some perspective from a speech by Dr. Donald Livingstion in Arlington, Virginia April 2007”

“…Lincoln’s posturing about no slavery in the West was in part an
extension of this white Anglo Saxon New England ideology – that all of
America should be like New England – white, Anglo Saxon. The New York
Tribune declared for instance, that barring slavery from the territories
would “give them an opportunity to become what New England is now,
namely a uniquely white commercial and industrious polity.” That’s
anti-slavery. The anti-slavery rhetoric of the 1850s had no high moral
content. It simply meant that the West was to remain an African free
zone….. it should be clear that Lee and the Confederacy were fighting
not to perpetuate slavery but for independence and self government.
Consequently the post 1960s [Marxist] histiography that dominates today
is simply false. It’s false on account of the record. But that is not
all for that histiography springs from a source of self deception that
has corrupted to a large extent our American identity. And like any
form of self deception it is grounded in a partial truth. There was in
the antebellum period an intense agitation about slavery. But this
agitation had nothing to do except in the rarest of cases, with a moral
concern for the black man. It’s hard for us to get our minds around
that. The institution was condemned because of its alleged bad effects
on northern whites and their vision of what America should be.

Five elements make up this anti-slavery syndrome as I’ll call it.
First, the institution encouraged laziness and hedonism in Southerners,
which discouraged the virtues of hard work and inventiveness at which
the north excelled, especially New England – and which were necessary
for commercial success or a powerful country. Slavery was a kind of
drug, you see. It drugged those people in the South.

Secondly, it produced in Southerners an aristocratic,
anti-democratic arrogant and even violent character with an in-ordinate
attachment to hunting, guns, horses, drinking and honor. Such people
were not fit to govern in a vast commercial republic modeled on New
England.

Third, slavery had lead to the moral decay of the South by bringing
Southerners into too close contact with Africans. Thomas Goodwin a
northern abolitionist in his book, A Natural History of Secession
published at the height of the war in 1864 declared that Southerners had
“African playmates, African attendants, African recreations, African
food, African voices, African minds.” ……….The moral corruption of
Southerners, he continues resulted from, “the direct influence of so
large a population of half barbarous Africans interspersed among them.”

Fourth, Blacks had corrupted the sexual morals of Southerners. This
is something that really got them exercised. And the reason for that,
blacks being half savages were just over-sexed. The abolitionist Louisa
Barker said that, black women, “lured young slave holders into illicit
attachments.” …. Another abolitionist Henry Wright wrote, “There is not
a nation or tribe of men so steeped in sexual pollution as this.” And
another abolitionist wrote, “The Southern states are one great Sodom.” …

Fifth, slavery enabled Southerners to develop an agricultural,
economic and political interest at odds with the rest of the country –
namely the mercantilism that Prof DiLorenzo talked about earlier today.
Southerners resisted a national bank, federal subsidies for business
and a high protective tariff to protect northern industry. All of which
[they felt] retarded economic progress of the country. And finally,
Southerners were now insisting on bringing their Africans and their
corrupt ways to the West. In none of this anti-slavery syndrome was
there any moral concern for the welfare of the black man.

What the anti-slavery syndrome really meant is that the institution
had so corrupted Southerners that they no longer had or could have an
honorable place in the Union and were not even competent to govern the
territory they occupied. They could see all these wonderful natural
resources in the South and they didn’t have boo understanding of what to
do with them. But New Englanders knew what to do with them. And so
Ralph Waldo Emerson was only following out its implication of this
anti-slavery syndrome when he argued near the end of the war for
confiscating Southern property. [He said], “By doing this you at once
open the whole South to the enterprise and genius of new men and extend
New England from Canada to the Gulf and to the Pacific.” ….

Why is history taught this way? The answer is that for over a
hundred years historians when they have wondered why was there a war –
why did we have this war? … asked the wrong question. The question
they’ve asked … is why did the South secede? Why oh why did the South
secede?.....

…..But the question we should be asking is this: Why did the north
invade?... Why did the north invade? The presumption behind this
question .. is the founding principle of the American Revolutionary
tradition - That a genuine society has a natural right to govern
itself. Southerners as inheritors of that tradition did not need a
reason to secede other than the desire to govern themselves and the
manifest ability to do so. …..

The moral problem for anyone who has given allegiance to this
founding American tradition was why was secession not allowed?….
Secession does not cause war as our historians assume. [Court
historians] all assume that secession causes war – hence the question
why did the South secede? – that’s why there was a war, because the
South seceded. Secession does not cause war. There was no war when
Norway seceded from Sweden in 1905 – or when Singapore seceded from the
Malaysian Federation in 1965 – or when 15 states seceded from the Soviet
Union in 1990. When the Soviet Union dissolved it was only around 70
years old. The same age as the united States in 1861.

So why did the north invade? Why was there a war? There was a war
because the north invaded. Let me say that again. There was a war
because the north invaded. Let me say that yet again. There was a war
because the north invaded – not because the South seceded. There was no
war in the Soviet Union. Wouldn’t it have been nice if we’d had the
Communist Party under Gorbachev and shouldn’t they thank God they did
not have the Republican Party under Lincoln.

Well let me give you an answer as to why the north invaded. There
was a time early after the war in which the north was very honest about
this. In 1877, Charles Bancroft distinguished northern historian gave
the correct explanation in his book, The Footprints of Time: A Complete
Analysis of our American System of Government. It’s what Thomas
Dilorenzo has called mercantilism – that’s our American System of
government. He’s telling you what our American System of government is
and why there was a war.

“While so gigantic a war was an immense evil, to allow the right of
peaceable secession would have been the ruin of the enterprise and
thrift of the industrious laborer and the keen eyed business man of the
north. It would have been the greatest calamity of the age. War was
less to be feared.”

I probably need to read that to you 3 times too, but I’m not going
to do it. But an invasion by the north merely to maintain a territorial
monopoly on coercion governed by northern commercial interests was and
is morally reprehensible. Americans should be deeply ashamed of it.
But of course they are not. If that war were fought today with today’s
population that war would have yielded over 5 million battle deaths –
not to mention wounded and missing. But to acknowledge the stark
immorality of the north’s invasion would be to throw into question the
legitimacy of the vast centralized regime built upon it. ---(Today’s
America in other words).

And since this truth is too disturbing to contemplate, mainline
historians have turned their face from it and have cobbled together
instead a picture instead of a head strong and wicked South that fought
to destroy the last best hope of man on earth, merely to perpetuate
slavery. …….

Henceforth instead of trying to answer the loaded question of why
did the South secede – it is time for a paradigm shift in historical
research – to the question why did the north invade? To answer this
question historians would have to explore and dissect the antebellum
northern mind as they have done the Southern mind. They have picked
over the Southern mind like you would an insect. But now we need to
study the northern mind. Had they thoroughly explored the darker
recesses of this northern mind we might be living in a quite different
country today, one in which the state of Virginia would be proud rather
than ashamed to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of
its most noble sons – instead we live in the vast consolidated empire
that Lee feared would emerge and which he said was sure to become
tyrannical at home and aggressive abroad. And he was right on both
counts I’m afraid. The war was not about slavery – but about
suppressing secession and consequently the founding American Principle
that a society should be able to govern itself [was also suppressed]. “

The above of course Mr. Fields just references slavery. The whole
of the modern “race” issue post dates the “American Civil War”, the
development of which in this country was put into place to justify what
the north’s war of conquest for money and power (the quest of which
founds all wars), of the South and control of the US government was
meant to accomplish.

The word racism entered the dictionary in 1932 as a noun and 1938 as
an adjective. Its origin was from the French word ‘racisme’ which
dates to 1935, originally in National Socialist (Hitler’s party’s)
lexicon. That word itself replaced words that originated in 1907,
(racialism) and in 1917 (racialist), having as their context the British
(and German) South African colonies.

The particulars of that conquest forms the foundation of the world
in which we all now live, and is why “many whites in this country are
still invested in the Civil War….” The schizophrenia of which I
referred above has yielded domestically a government dedicated to the
proposition that the purpose of the US government has always been to
eradicate traditional/racist/backward/religionist thinking both at home
and abroad. Those of us whose ancestors fought on behalf of a different
worldview and result disagree. That continued disagreement is exactly
why that schizophrenia exists in a government divided not along the
Mason Dixon line, but now down every Main Street in the country, over
cultural issues (rather than the concocted “racial context”) and
yielding a foreign policy also Jacobin in its practice and which now has
us on the verge of the next round of potential cataclysm.

You modern Jacobins (whether you know you are one or not), demand
the rest of us accede to your list of false choices. Those false
choices demand that we accept the mandate of modern Jacobin
prescriptions be adopted which are inevitably in conflict with the
constitutional principles of this country’s founding- hence incessant
reference about segregation and the 1960s civil rights legislation. We
are asked to believe that the cessation of the mistreatment of the
descendants of former slaves depends on that Jacobin interpretation of
history and that the destruction of the founding constitutional
principles of our government in order to affect “racial justice” must be
disregarded.

That demand is of course, nonsense. Such nonsense wouldn’t have
gained such traction had Booker T. Washington’s views remained dominate
in the early 1900s. But Booker’s views of course, were ridiculed and
overthrown by the Marxist founders of the NAACP whose view of such
“racial justice” was founded on the Marxist view of history propounded
by that organization’s founder WEB Dubois, which you reflect.
Therefore, much as one encounters with “optical illusions”, whether one
sees Confederate symbols as “racist” or as a symbol of an appropriate
constitutional defense to these problems given to us through the
hypocritical northern filter which we have inherited, .. that in
actuality reflects a northern explanation of this country’s history
based on ideals which post-dated the issues over which the north and
South fought those many years ago. It should be remembered the US
Supreme Court decisions that sanctioned segregation 30 years after 1865
were passed 8 to1 by northern appointees to that court and the sole
dissenting vote was from a Southerner appointed to that court. You of
course, given the blinders provided by the Jacobin world view, would be
blind to the significance of that.

That blindness (or willful disregard), accounts for the attempts to
cast the South and its fight in some other light (racist, backward,
repressive etc) for the sake of the maintenance of today’s power
elites’ continuance in positions of authority and the advancement of a
French Revolution inspired political agenda. The trouble is, the lies
told to accomplish those goals dishonor the dead, who can no longer
defend themselves – and they happen to be the blood kin of many of us.

In conclusion I will share my response to an article back on 17 May 2009 appearing in the Lexington, Kentucky Herald Leader:

This past Sunday 17 May 2009 the Herald Leader published a piece by
Leonard Pitts, syndicated columnist that appeared in The Miami Herald
concerning an altercation between two young men, one white and one black
titled Race Matters. That piece concluded with the line “….They never
had a chance”.

How appropriate Pitts ended his piece with that comment. The young
men involved in the matter of which Pitts writes truly have no chance
because those such as Mr. Pitts do nothing to further the cause of
understanding history, but instead advance an ideology.

Indeed, the violence inspired by "racially disparaging remarks" Mr.
Pitts decries results from a view inculcated by the propagation of the
"racial" agenda French Communists invented over 70 years ago that has
helped deprive us of our history rather than explain it.....Rather than
the false premise of “race” what is demonstrated is the impossibility of
putting history behind us. History is always an interpretation and not
some “objective” truth. What passes for history today has become an
exercise in ideology and not historical reflection.

In reality the claim that the violence of which Pitts writes would
all disappear if the correct understanding of history prevailed is
actually a call for the censuring of any interpretation that would
question the prevailing Marxist reading of America’s past. In fact, the
propagation of the kind of ideology Pitts holds helps create such
violence.
The ideology that sprang from the French Revolution via the Jacobins
held that enlightened elites, in the name of human progress should have
the power to eradicate any and all institutions from the human past
that disagreed with their agenda for the advancement of the human
project toward its proper perfection. It was precisely such a view and
the consolidation of power into the hands of such elites that
Confederate soldiers opposed, however imperfectly they expressed that
opposition. Or as Zhou Enlai replied to a reporter during Nixon’s visit
to China when asked about the result of the French Revolution that it
was ”… too soon to tell.”

These matters are not as “racial” or as simple as Pitts would
proclaim. Indeed, the Southern Populist movement of the 1890s is an
example. Tom Watson, the leading light of Southern populism at the time
said, "You [white and black Southerners] are made to hate each other
because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial
despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that
you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system
which beggars you both."

Indeed. And are we not watching that unfold at this very hour? So
as your pocket is picked by a federal government dominated by northern
financial interests with the new bailout of the day – I would encourage
all to consider that Mr. Pitts is simply one more drop in that ocean of
subterfuge.

But I suppose you are proud Mr. Fields to also take part in such
subterfuge. How disgusting and contemptible. Blood quilt – what you
and all your Jacobin friends are drenched in – may its sweet maddening
smell, haunt your stone cold morally confused souls.

Bazz Childress

PS - Several acts of Congress, which are listed below, have defined
Veterans of the Confederate States of America as Veterans of the United
States due the same benefits and honors as any other American Veteran.
Samples:

P.L. 38, 59th Congress, Chap. 631-34 Stat. 56)
U.S. Public Law 810, Approved by 17th Congress 26 February 1929(45
Stat 1307 - Currently on the books as 38 U.S. Code, Sec. 2306)

This law, passed by the U.S. Congress, authorized the “Secretary of
War to erect headstones over the graves of soldiers who served in the
Confederate Army and to direct him to preserve in the records of the War
Department the names and places of burial of all soldiers for whom such
headstones shall have been erected.”

U.S. Public Law 85-425: Sec. 410 Approved 23 May 1958(US Statutes at Large Volume 72, Part 1, Page 133-134)

The Administrator shall pay to each person who served in the
military or naval forces of the Confederate States of America during the
Civil War a monthly pension in the same amounts and subject to the same
conditions as would have been applicable to such person under the laws
in effect on December 31, 1957, if his service in such forces had been
service in the military or naval forces of the United States.

U.S. Code Title 38 - Veterans’ Benefits, Part II -

General Benefits, Chapter 15 - Pension for Non-Service-Connected
Disability or Death or for Service, Subchapter I - General, § 1501.
Definitions: (3) The term “Civil War veteran” includes a person who
served in the military or naval forces of the Confederate States of
America during the Civil War, and the term “active military or naval
service” includes active service in those forces.

After Friday's votes in the House, you're probably confused about the status of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA). The confusion arises from the fact that a TPA bill was passed by the House on Friday by 219-211. Since the Senate had passed TPA on May 22, this would ordinarily mean that the next stop for TPA would be President Obama's desk where he would sign it into law.

However, when the Senate passed TPA on May 22, it was part of a package that included Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) legislation. TAA provides job-training assistance to workers who have lost their jobs due to trade agreements. House leadership decided to separate the TPA and TAA portions of the Senate trade package and have standalone votes on them last Friday. Since the Senate had passed both TPA and TAA as a package, the House would have to pass both TPA and TAA to avoid having to open negotiations with the Senate, coming up with compromise legislation, and then voting again in both House and Senate on TPA and TAA legislation.

Before the House voted on TAA last Friday, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi gave a speech on the House floor in which she asked her fellow Democrats to vote NO on TAA in order "to slow down" the "fast track" TPA legislation and give Democrats the opportunity to amend it. When it came time for the TAA vote, 143 Democrats joined her to defeat the bill overwhelmingly, 126-302. This meant that TPA would be temporarily derailed. Click here to see the details of that vote.

A Green Beret and a real American war hero, Lt. Col.
Jason Amerine, exposed illegal and amoral activities by the Obama
administration worthy of a tinpot dictatorship that took place over the
Bergdahl swap. A complaint about an illegal ransom of about $2 billion paid for Bergdahl in addition to swapping five dangerous Taliban thugs implicated the DOD and the DOJ.
Amerine told Congress, which is well within his legal rights. In fact, it was his duty.

Because this brave man told the truth, he is facing a court-martial.

This is a courageous man still fighting for his country; his treatment is an outrage.

Lt.
Col. Shaffer, a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research,
confirmed to Fox News that he received the same information from his
sources that a ransom was paid though it is “completely against U.S.
law”.

Police in Santa Ana, California, raided a medical marijuana
dispensary last month after it was discovered that the establishment was
operating without a business permit.

Surveillance cameras captured officers bursting into the pot shot
with their guns drawn and ordering everyone onto the ground. However,
the police officers are then seen on video removing the mounted
surveillance cameras.

But they missed the hidden cameras, according to attorney Matthew Pappa of Long Beach.

Remembrance

Winners: Navy Cross Nguyen Van Kiet & MOH Thomas R. Norris This week’s Medal of Honor hero is one of a handful of Navy SEALs awarded the MOH in the Vietnam War. Norris snuck behind enemy lines with a South Vietnamese Navy petty officer rescued two downed pilots in 1972–when most of our resources had been pulled from the country. Interesting to note that later year, Norris was himself rescued by another SEAL Michael E. Thornton.More @ Medal of Honor Roll Call

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Core Creek Militia

==============================My sixth great grandfather, his wife, and five of his six children were killed in battle with the Tuscarora Indians at Core Creek, NC.

The Seven Blackbirds

==============================My third great grandfather was an Ensign in the Revolutionary War, and saved his unit's flag after being wounded at the Battle of Brandywine. He was also at Kingston (Kinston), Wilmington, Charleston, Two Sisters and Augusta. He was at the defeat at Brier Creek and also Bee Creek.

Requiem Aeternam -
Eternal Rest Grant unto Them
==============================
My second great grandfather was killed in action on May 3, 1863 at the Battle of Chancellorsville.
=============================
My great grandfather and great uncle knew all the men in the "Civil War Requiem" video as they were part of the 53rd NC which was the sole unit defending Fort Mahone. (Fort Mahone was named "Fort Damnation" by the Yankees) *Handpicked men of the 53rd (My great grandfather was one of these) made the final, night assault at Petersburg in an attempt to break Grant's line. This was against Fort Stedman which was a few miles to the slight northeast. They initially succeeded, but reinforcements drove them back. This video is made from photographs which were taken the day after the 53rd evacuated the lines the night before to begin the retreat to Appomattox. I have many more pictures taken by the same photographer, one of these shows a 14 year old boy and the other is the famous picture of the blond, handsome soldier with his musket.
===========================
*General Gordon promised the men a gold medal and 30 days leave if they accomplished their task and many years after the War my great grandfather wrote General Gordon, who was then governor of Georgia about this incident. They exchanged several letters which I have framed. See first link below.
===========================
*The Attack On Fort Stedman
============================
"His Colored Friends"
============================
Lee's Surrender
=============================
My Black NC Kinfolks
============================
Punished For Being Caught!

Great Grandfather Koonce

He was a drummer boy in the WBTS, survived the War only to die a few years later. He was caught in an ice storm on his way home, but instead of seeking shelter, continued on his horse until the end. His clothes had to be cut off and he died a few days later.